Lazarus watched the next wave as it swelled. The latest Universe rippled, flashing from a point to a cloud, a cloud to an eternity of sparkling matter and light, and then collapsing back into itself in a mouldering entropy of decay.Lazarus sighed.“What?” Said Peck, frowning slightly.Lazarus stared at his friend. It was true, they had existed since before the beginning of time. No doubt they would exist beyond the end of eternity. Still - Peck really was a dolt, sometimes.“It’s just…” Lazarus hesitated. He watched the next bubble of spacetime whispering its way into existence, balancing on the edge of possibility. It was full of promise, full of potential. But Lazarus knew how things would go. It was always the same. How could he express that to his friend? Was there a word for it? The disappointment he felt every time the sparkling potential crashed down through inevitable spirals of dissipating energy, matter condensing and radiating, forming and exploding, the dance of atoms up the elemental chain, the formation of planets - brief dense clots in the infinitely spreading, thinning cloud of existence - and then life, fragile, sensitive, as delicate as a daydream, blooming, flourishing…and then fading (after a moment or a million moments, it mattered not), crushed under the final, inevitable realisation that the whole of its host reality was locked in - a closed system - an energy signature which was destined for only one thing: the long flat line, and the end of all potential before it had even properly begun. And if that wasn’t bad enough, to have to sit here, like Lazarus and Peck sat, lodged in the phase-shelf between the endless expanding bubbles of Universe after Universe, to watch it again and again, forever…“Never mind,” muttered Lazarus, turning away and flipping a stone off into the front of the latest expanding Universe, where it lodged in the heart of a fledgling galaxy, displacing the central black hole, which in turn flew off, starting a chain reaction which terminated the entire Universe in a soft, disappointed hiss.“Hey!” Complained Peck. “I was enjoying that one!”

She was a dragon, of course, but being a Lady always came first."You let the children go, naturally," she would tell her students, dragon whelplings of only half a hundred summers. "We might be monsters, but that doesn't mean we have to behave like beasts."Lady Dragon's Finishing School For Sophisticated Young Dragons was very popular, the very best that money could buy, and all the aspirational upwardly-mobile dragons sent their whelplings there."After all," they told one another, "you can't put a price on class."And class was what Lady Dragon's students got. Her school turned out the most sophisticated, the most debonair young dragons, dragons who were sure to get ahead.Or rather, that was what was supposed to happen...It was what always happened...Except in the case of Wilbert.